Siblings: Chesspeople
by Ananke Adrasteia
Summary: Short stories set in the Siblings alternate universe.
1. Prelude

_Note: 'Tis but a wee prelude to Siblings. If I ever write another short story set in the - ekhm, universe - such as Faldorn's story, or Edwin's, or Viconia's (yes, they all have their own stories); or H'D's sonnets about Imoen, or Imoen's first meeting with Coran, or Sarevok's with Tamoko, or Sarevok's with Aran Linvail - gods, plot bunnies just swarm me right now! - I'll post it in the subsequent chapters. Quality may vary, but please do enjoy:)_

**---**

**Prelude**

They all believed; they all wanted to believe; they all wanted to believe that what they believed in at all mattered.

It might be an interesting experiment to see them fall.

---

"Kha—Khalid! No!"

The druid, circling cautiously the man who, in a sense, brought them all here on this night, dodging his mad blows as she calmly sought an opening for her own strike; what did she believe in? Friendship and justice, he had been informed: friendship such as transcends the grave and demands that one take upon the foster child of a dead friend; and such justice as must be brought upon his killer.

Her husband—her husband, who, he had been told, wanted to believe that his feeling for her sufficed to make him adequate for her—had just been killed: how did it affect the druid? First, a scream of denial; almost instantly, a renewed sense of intent. Curious. So, the information had been correct: she was a strong woman.

An arrow passed through the large hall. It struck its target and killed it. So, the archer finally caught his prey.

The archer: what was his motive? Vengeance. Yes, vengeance; he believed that it would— What? Bring peace to his soul, perhaps; a necessary step before he might move on. He had caught his prey, and was now learning that it did not bring peace to his soul; that there was no vengeance but that for vengeance's own sake. Falling as he rose; what a beautiful paradox. There was some abstract pity in that the archer would have too little time before him to learn to appreciate it properly.

The filthy dog the archer had felled. Simplistic motives for a mundane mind: belief in its leader; in its leader's power; in its leader's skills. A desire for aimless bloodlust which its leader let it exercise freely as long as he held it on its leash. It had fallen as it had lived; not even meriting the denomination of a person.

Its two comrades still lived, the guardsman and the neophyte; both as boring as it had been. Talented or brainless, their ambitions did not stretch beyond living in luxury and purposelessly terrorising their fellows, he had been told; their fall would be as insipid as their lives.

By the morrow, both would be forgotten; of course, so would be the supposed heroes of this confrontation. There were bards partial to sagas of failures and fallen heroes; but, on the morrow in Baldur's Gate, even the bards would be perplexed.

The other wizard, the second elf—now, his was a more interesting case. Until recently, a realist, properly aware of the complete insignificance of his own existence; for some time now, however, he had been told, tentatively claiming that he might, possibly, live to see the end of the affair he was embroiled in. The irony was apposite: the world really did not care. His life was, indeed, useless. He was, indeed, doomed. He would understand it again as he fell.

Curious. He had looked up, at the rafters of the temple. Perhaps he had even seen the observers. This did not matter; his eyes would be taken even if he had not.

The Children.

The Children. Yes; it would be interesting to see them fail and fall.

First, the dwarf who was the reason of the enchanter's evolution; who believed, apparently, in the righteousness of her own cause; who believed also, apparently, that one's blood does not determine one's destiny.

She failed.

The second Child, the hidden one, was screaming; and their brother, covered head-to-toe in the blood of the druid and her husband, was laughing madly, as the dwarf disappeared in a cloud of glittering dust. She was aware of her failure; he was convinced of his victory. Wrongly, of course.

The watcher turned to the dark figure stretched lazily on the rafter next to him. "This seems to be our cue, sister."

Two elves, two men and two Children still remained alive. It was time for more… experiments.


	2. Human Sacrifice

**Human Sacrifice**

The ugly twelve-year-old playing with the fire was not crying.

The elf hesitated only for a moment before approaching her. "Congratulations!" he said, in a tone of completely fake merriment. He had had far too much of the other sort. "I heard that you turned into a panther today. Poor Tobias… They'll heal him, but his throat will never be the same."

The girl smiled into the fire. "What is it about me being a stray, Dalok?"

"Strays, my dear," the elf drawled, stretching out lazily next to her and picking an errant strand of the long, dirty brown hair to play with, "are useful. They supply fresh blood into the pool. They prevent degeneration and withering of bloodlines into diminished, stunted, sickly specimens… My people are, perhaps, the best example of what happens when a folk refuses to let go of outdated modes—"

Another smile. "They die. Mother Nature knows no mercy."

"Crossbreeds, love," the elf went on, "are usually superior in every way to the unaltered stock. That is why plants go to such ways to avoid self-pollination—"

"Don't talk to me about plants, Dalok," the bored girl interrupted, nestling herself next to the elf without once taking her eyes off the fire. "I don't want to hear about plants. You still haven't answered my question. What is it about me being a stray?"

"Ah," the elf said, drawing her close and kissing lightly the top of her head. "Now, that, Faldorn, is a long story…"

---

The man had blood on his hands and a wild look in his eyes. "She lost it! She lost it—"

The elf idling on the meadow looked up at him languidly from under the heavy, half-closed eyelids. "What did you expect?" he asked, gesticulating with the blade of grass he had been chewing, "It's the third one in a row. Did you really think that she would keep it long enough this time?"

The man sat down heavily and sighed. "Not I. She. She really hoped she would pull through this time—"

"Just like both previous times," the elf replied, annoyed. "Face it. Your wife is incapable of having a child."

"I know that, Dalok! Try explaining that to her!"

The elf shrugged. "She is your wife, not mine."

The man did not reply.

Suddenly, the elf's eyes lit up. "I know! Do you know those two fisherfolk who live by the lake to the south? The woman recently gave birth to a baby. Let's go and get it! Then, once she wakes up, she'll think the baby is hers—"

---

The woman's interest in the child waned some half a year later. Perhaps, with some curious instinct, she perceived that the girl was not her own; perhaps, simply, it was that the baby was not a beautiful one, that it cried at night for food and woke her up, and that it demanded attention during the day, too, and she had less time to spend with her friends, and with her husband, and hunting.

The friends and the husband were wavering, undecided. Some thought that the child should be killed, because no one really cared about it much, and it still ate its share. Some, like Dalok, were more willing to let it stay; and so, year after year, the child, who turned out to be a strong one, grew up among the Shadow Druids.

The woman died when the child was five years old, in her fourth failed attempt to have a child of her own—for, by that time, she, too, knew that Faldorn had not been hers. The child stayed with her foster father, pottering about, hunting, ravaging, partaking in the rituals, killing those who dared infringe the sanctity of Cloakwood Forest and the Wood of Sharp Teeth; in other words, doing all the things other children her age did. To his credit, the man never touched her; but, Dalok suspected, only because he barely noticed her existence. Most people did not; the malnourishment of her early age took its toll, and, in any case, Faldorn had never been a pretty child. She was short, dark-haired and completely unexceptional; not the sort of person whose existence one notices.

The elf himself found the girl fascinating. She was calm and purposeful; too calm. There were moments when she revealed a hellish temper boiling underneath that surface—such as earlier that very day, when she had changed into a panther and almost torn out the throat of a boy who had teased her. He had never seen a prepubescent, completely untrained human do so; the strength of Faldorn's instinctive link with nature reminded him almost of the kindred's he had willingly exiled himself from.

She would be great, he thought as he watched her at work and at play; he longed to see what that blazing, angry fire would do to the world when sicced at it in full. Only several more years; several more years. To an elf, nothing. But he wished that they were past him already.

She was looking at him now with a lightly mocking look. "And that's all?" she laughed. "You two killed my birth parents to deliver me to a weak, barren woman failed in her womanhood? Why ever should I have not learnt this all before?"

He wanted her, that moment, with that fire in her eyes; but he said only, calmly, "You used to call that woman your mother."

The girl scowled. "Nature is my mother. It is she who feeds me and protects me and delivers me the means to kill my enemies!"

At that, suddenly, abruptly, hastily, he must push her away.

Swiftly, as an elf should, he rose to his feet. "I—" he started; his own voice felt dry and weak to him. "I am leaving the tribe tomorrow. I will return a year from then. And—who knows, love?" he said, daring to look at the girl by the fire again. "If you are a woman then, perhaps I will take you for my mate?"

On the ground, Faldorn, as always, playing with fire, laughed shrilly. "No. When you return a year and a day from today, and I am a woman, it will be I who will take you for my mate, Dalok!"

---

A golden-eyed man was standing over a freshly dug grave. He had come here in search for peace from the racket in the village, where the druids were currently masochistically pleasing themselves mourning their dead. The little sister would be sure to remember her own half-elf on the occasion, and, for the moment, he was not in the mood for fighting; not today.

And the incessant ululating was grating on his nerves.

For a moment, he stood over the grave, with his arms folded and his head cocked lightly to the side, studying it indolently. As graves went, he decided in the end, it was a good one. It existed.

Victims deserved no memory; but the man was bored, and there was nothing to do. For a moment, he wondered what the woman's epitaph would be if the druids put epitaphs on their graves instead of letting them grow all over with weeds as Mother Nature accepted her children back into her lap.

_She was powerful, like a forest fire. Too powerful. In the end, all I could do was let her consume herself._

Perhaps Cernd had had the right of it. Brilliant, like a forest fire. And, in the end, completely insane.

---

_Meta:_

_(1) Horses' Move is mainly Imoen and Cernd's story. It's Imoen who propels things there. Stuck to her POV, I had to make heavy cuts to Sarevok's part—that is, most through which I had planned to connect Faldorn and Sarevok is still in the text, but there was just no way to insert that last scene, which kind of made the point of the whole exercise moot._

_Because, aye, that's where Sarevok disappeared during the funeral, even though he had decided to be on Cernd's—Imoen's—side in the confrontation._

_(2) On the title: At the beginning of Horses' Move, Faldorn plans to make a sacrifice of Cernd's son. Ashdale is saved; but, in a way, a full-moon human sacrifice still happens—without witnessing Faldorn's death, and all that came afterwards, the siblings would have recovered their horses, but Imoen would never go hunting her brother in Trademeet…_

_In other words, Faldorn herself acts as the scapegoat; the pharmakos whose death, however indirectly, clears the air between the siblings._

_Or, at least, that was the intent._


	3. Candlekeep

**A/N: Just a vignette, because I'm replaying BG1, got to chapter 6, and I absolutely _love_ Sarevok's sheer stupid guts in that one!**

* * *

She looked through the window. "So, which one will you be marrying?"

Spread on the bed-sheets, playing with the deck of cards in his hands – now, the right hand sent the cards, flying, into the left hand; now, the exercise reversed and the small sheets of rice paper returned effortlessly, unconsciously, to their initial position – he frowned. "Silvershield, of course."

Skie Silvershield was a brat. She almost pitied the girl.

Entar really shouldn't have refused the first time, she thought, relieved, when, still frowning, he added, "If that is still necessary, that is. Technically—"

Technically, the office of the Grand Duke was not hereditary, she knew as he launched into one of his favourite tirades. Technically, the Grand Duke was chosen on his, or; more rarely–hers, merits. Technically, Skie Silvershield's brother need not have died, killed as he had been killed as he had travelled in a well-defended caravan, another regrettable casualty of the recent increase in bandit activity, may I offer you, sir, my deepest condolence?

She shifted on the bed, lightly; usually, she found it easy to lie in wait, coiled and relaxed at the same time, like a snake in a bush, awaiting her victim and poised to strike; today, she was restless. "Is the innkeeper here one of your people?"

He laughed; that small, delightful laugh which reminded her again how utterly, completely, hopelessly in love with him she was. "No. Shalak's kindred can look like humans and sound like humans, but they do prefer their flesh raw. I want to be well served. Winthrop will be replaced tomorrow, after we leave."

She still did not like the idea that they should be here at all.

He had had the hard face when he had decided, though; the hard face which meant that she would never learn why it was so important to him to see Rieltar Anchev dead, with his own eyes, and not merely as an item in Shalak's report, but that he had made up his mind and would not change it.

She twitched again; and eyed the grey mass of the great library behind the tavern window. Somewhere there was Rieltar. And Brunos. And it wasn't further than a stone's throw from them to this tavern where he and she were cooped up, in hiding, waiting for the morrow— "I don't want you to be seeing Cythandria anymore," she said, suddenly.

The cruel mouth twitched lightly. "No. You don't," he agreed easily.

"But you will."

"Yes. I will," he replied.

This had been a constant fixture in their conversations for the past two weeks, she realised, suddenly.

"Why?" she asked, hating that she was woeful. "She is using you. You know that."

"Perhaps I'm tired of a woman whose whole idea of perfume boils down to the stench of blood."

It stung more than it should have. "You said when we first met that it was what you liked in me."

"When we first met. Things have changed since then."

They had, she thought as, in what he clearly meant as a conciliatory tone, he said, "Listen. You are the one I have taken here—"

"She is the one to whom you have entrusted your files!"

Another twitch, this time ugly and impatient. "I have told you this before. She didn't say no. It's you who are being difficult. If you ever—"

"No," she interrupted him roughly, disgusted by the possibility.

He shrugged, put away the cards, and, unruffled; because no, she would not have the strength to say no, no more, forever, ever, not ever – sprang to his feet in one fluid motion, the one fluid motion of the trained fighter. "In any case, it will not be long," he announced, following her gaze through the window, to the library. "The pieces are set. The endgame will soon begin."

He smirked, approached the table, and opened the small, ornate box which had been standing on it untouched since the previous evening. "My sibling is coming here," he said, casually, "Zhelimar was not strong enough to stop her. He is dead. They are all dead. She is coming here. I can feel that."

Now, he was talking with the fervent words of the true obsessed, and instantly she missed the cold, callous bastard. Anything was better than this sick, mad drive; insistence—

But he _was_ a half-god, a god-in-birth, _wakamiya_, she remembered, painfully. His mad energy was what had attracted her arrogance to him, first— The box. The ring.

The ring within the box radiated an aura of protection; small surprise. She turned it round in her fingers, and prodded, carefully, "So, this is your sibling love?"

After the brief moment, he smirked. "As much of it as I can afford."

Immediately, she felt jealous.

She wondered, vaguely, about that other Child, that Child she had last seen scurrying away, escaping like the small, frightened mouse, or the bitch, with the tail tuckered between her legs— Golden eyes glimmered lightly with curiosity. "I wonder how she has changed," he said, his meticulous attention henceforth completely on his nemesis; and she could only think, _Hold me, Sarevok._


End file.
